A History
Lesson
Our country has no essential written Constitution and, as such, it is
open to convenient interpretation or even disregard. Such disregard
would be fiercely opposed in the UK parliament but not here.

Until 1949, The Isle of Man was a full-blown British colony. The
extra-parliamentary Manx National Reform League (established 1903) and
a Select Committee of Tynwald (established 1904, reporting 1905)
petitioned the UK for constitutional reform. Both reformist parties
recognised that the UK was abusing the established constitutional
relationship between Keys and Council to exert its influence: The
Legislative Council was composed entirely of Crown appointments and the
Legislature controlled all the Boards.

The Keys unsuccesfully suggested that two appointed members of the
Legislature be replaced by two members elected indirectly by the House
of Keys. The high-handed behaviour of Lord Raglan (Lieutenant Governor
1903-1919) enjoyed solid support from the UK Home Office and, in 1911,
the Keys actually refused to progress any matters for two months. This
forced a UK commission into constitutional review (The MacDonnell
Commission). The results were hardly breathtaking but it did signal the
limitation of governors' terms to five years.

Colonial abuse continued. The UK used both the Legislature and the
"Royal Assent" to block and frustrate the Keys but, after the Second
World War, a different situation prevailed: A fresh UK Labour
Government, a collapsing British Empire and UN resolutions brought a
new willingness to decolonise administratively. More importantly, the
status quo was likely to force the UK to actually inject rather than
extract revenue from the Island, but the UK remained firmly opposed to
any notion of independence.

Changes were discussed from 1949 on, leading to the transfer of
Treasury powers to Tynwald in 1958. Prior to this, however, a Royal
Commission was established at Tynwald's request in 1957 to investigate
more reform. The resultant "MacDermott Commission" reported in 1959.
Its recommendations fell far short of the Keys' desires but it did
accept the notion of reducing some Legislative Council powers. A
nucleus of Crown appointed members remained and the reduction in
Council power mimicked the UK's House of Lords, rather than taking
regard of the Manx constitutional position of the Legislative Council
in pre-colonial days. It remained firmly opposed to erosion of the
Lieutenant Governor's executive status and the Home Office made it
clear to the Keys that any attempt to legislate away such power would
be ultimately obstructed.

Nonetheless, 60 years of pressure for reform had led to a House of Keys
with a toe in the door of the Legislative Council. The 1970s saw, at
long last, a reduction in the Lieutenant-Governor's powers and a move
towards a Tynwald executive.

In comparison to the slow change of the previous century, the
transition from government by Boards under UK direction to ministerial
government with its own executive took place at lightening speed. It
also co-incided with a transition in personnel in Tynwald from those
who had suffered and understood the colonial era with its failings, to
those whose appreciation of those days was less developed.

The result was that the first Tynwald to see ministerial government
also permitted the first Chief Minister to consolidate his personal
power base with the approval of the "Hire and Fire" powers instead of
Tynwald sanctioned ministers. The imbalance of power was recognised by
some but they were defeated. Subsequent attempts at reform have been
defeated with accusations of "navel gazing" from both within and
without Tynwald. The concensus politics of the 60s and 70s, where
disagreement and dissent did not lead to marginalisation, have been
replaced by personality based politics and shallow power-grabbing. This
has all happened, not only under the nose of the UK, but with its
explicit approval.

With the re-appointment of Donald Gelling to Chief Minister,
constitutional propriety has been thrown out of the window, with the
reliance instead being put upon pure legislation. As a result, a
written, democratic constitution becomes an imperative rather than
preference.

House of Cards

Manx society should not be
surprised by the reaction of certain Manx politicians to the widespread
UK and Irish media coverage of recent political developments here. Mec
Vannin knows that behind the scenes, the reaction has been even more
furious, verging on the hysterical. We are aware that there have been
clashes, confrontations and raised voices in the Members Room of
Tynwald.

It is ironic but inevitable that successive Manx Governments, whose
master plan has apparently been to increase our "independence" by
making us ever more reliant on a sometimes dubious finance sector,
should be absolutely petrified by any reference in the British and
Irish press to the conclusions of the Mount Murray Inquiry, or the
recently disclosed £120,000,000 MEA scandal, let alone to a
"seedy tax-haven". Their reaction betrays their nervous apprehension,
as if they know that sooner or later the whole edifice will come
crashing down at the whim of a British Government. In fact, not so much
the House of Keys, more a house of cards.

It can be cause for satisfaction to Mec Vannin that the coverage in the
UK and Irish media was a self-inflicted wound on the Manx Government
(but not the Manx people). The adverse publicity was a direct outcome
of the stifling of dissent here at home, the closure of internet
forums, the truncation of Mannin Line, the failure of the print media
to reflect divergence of opinion and the apparent bias of certain Manx
Radio reporters. Contrary to the perception of some of our politicians,
the world media isn't queueing up to take a shot at the Isle of Man.
Ultimately, however, high profile allegations and arrests made coverage
inevitable. Mec Vannin has been assured that the interest in Manx
affairs shown by the British and Irish media will continue, and in
particular the £120,000,000 MEA fiasco is being closely watched.
The Manx Government would be wise to remember that.

On the way out....
Since the election of Donald Gelling as Chief Minister, rumours have
been rife of a ministerial re-shuffle sometime in the New Year. One man
who should be feeling distinctly nervous is the current Treasury
Minister, Allan Bell, whose political career is surely in terminal
decline, and not just because of the MEA affair.

It is surely inconceivable that Mr. Bell can any longer aspire to be a
future Chief Minister. More importantly, Donald Gelling knows that Bell
can never be a Chief Minister and this presents him with a problem:
Rightly or wrongly, it appears that since the introduction of the
Ministerial system, a Chief Minister is in a strong position to
virtually nominate his successor, or at least seriously influence the
choice, through the appointment of his Treasury Minister. Thus, the
unfolding MEA scandal presents Gelling with an ideal opportunity to
move Bell out of the Treasury (and out of CoMin altogether) so that his
protégé (whoever he or she might be) can be in place for
the next couple of years and use the position as a springboard to
become the next Chief Minister in two years time.

The question of whether there is anybody in the present Council of
Ministers capable of either position is another matter altogether.

Lerts in short
supply

In the wake of the initial Al
Q'aida attacks, Anglo-American propaganda was really pumping the
bio-terrorism. It quickly emerged that the UK didn't have anything like
sufficient vaccine for a mass immunisation programme in the event of
such an attack and it was established that the Isle of Man had only
sufficient vaccine for "key personnel" in the event of an outbreak.
Furthermore, there appears to have been no attempt to address this
deficiency.

Then we had former DLGE minister Pam Crowe's famous "kipper" quip in
relation to iodine tablets. This was after both the UK and Irish
governments issued iodine tablets to the communities in danger from
radioactive contamination should there be yet another incident during
the decomission of Windscale / Sellafield.

Another inquiry to the Island's Director of Public Health in August
2003 revealed that the Island had ample stocks of iodine tablets which,
if taken promptly, prevent the body absorbing dangerous isotopes into
the thyroid gland. Despite this, there are no plans to distribute them.

In the correspondence, Dr. MacLean stated that he perceived the threat
of terrorism to be measurably greater than contamination from
Sellafield. Since then, attempts to stoke terrorism fears have included
the "dirty bomb" scenario. Still no iodine tablets. Still no smallpox
vaccine.

A few weeks before Christmas, all households in the Island received an
"information leaflet" entitled "Be A Lert" telling us all what to
do in case of a terrorist attack. What it didn't include was any plans
to distribute our ample stocks of iodine tablets or acquire smallpox
vaccine.

I'm sure that I am not alone in consigning the leaflet straight to the
bin, largely unread and, cynic that I am, I believe that that was the
very intention. The mass-burn incinerator at Richmond Hill needs
feeding. Expect more "information leaflets" through your door. Don't
expect anything that may actually help you in case of a terrorist
attack or an accident at Sellafield.

Housing Shortage

As land and subsequent housing values
become entangled with social values, the best housing appears to be
that kept away from the hoipolloi. Ever spiralling house prices have
ensured that none but the already comfortably off can afford to buy a
house in the grotesquely inflated Manx housing market.

The construction of affordable homes for the person of ordinary means
seems to defeat government and its masters in the construction industry
permanently. After all no construction company wants to build six
starter homes if the same piece of land can be used to build one posh
manor house. "Exclusive" developments of luxury homes are advertised
everywhere, and exclusive is how both the builders and many of the
neighbours want them to remain.

It is perfectly possible, with sufficient government support, to build
affordable housing but the economic cleansing in which both
construction companies and government conspire is exacerbating the Manx
housing crisis.

As the builders concentrate on providing expensive homes the rich have
more choice than ever before, just as the poor are discovering that
there is nowhere to turn. The shortfall is blamed by the
developers on
the lack of suitable land. In reality the development industry itself
appears to be one of the principal culprits. Just a handful
control
much of the Island's potential building land and sit happily on their
assets in order to increase the value of the homes they sell. They have
little incentive to build now if they can ensure that prices continue
to boom. They have no incentive whatsoever to solve the underlying
crisis by building small cheap homes rather than large expensive ones.

There are plenty of solid arguments for fighting development
encroaching into our ever diminishing countryside, keeping new
development as compact as possible, regenerating run-down town areas
and using brownfield land before building in the countryside. Good
urban design cuts crime, encourages social integration nd reduces
inequality. But good urban design is the enemy of the development
companies. Building on greenfield land is far cheaper than clearing
existing sites and, if the land was bought at agricultural prices, far
more profitable.

What problems of this kind suggest is that housing provision simply
cannot be left to the market. The first measure it must take is
to use
planning law to hold down the cost of land. Development land reaches
the value of the most lucrative use to which it can be put. If land is
zoned only, or largely for, affordable housing, then its price falls
accordingly. This zoning would have to be accompanied by a time limit,
to prevent developers from sitting on it pending a change of policy.

There is no room for second and third homes, or property investment
portfolios, where others have none.

A New Year quiz
for John Rimington DoLGE

What has happened to the Draft
Braddan Plan?

Was a complaint made by a member of the public concerning a potential
perception of bias in drawing up the Draft Braddan Plan, contrary to
the first recommendation of the Pilling Report?

Did that perception of bias revolve around the planning officer
apparently responsible for drawing up the Draft Braddan Plan being a
resident of the Parish?

Was an independent inquiry held into this complaint?

Has a report now been received?

Has the complaint been upheld?

If it has been upheld, how does your Department intend to respond, in
the light of what might be considered serious maladministration?

Bonus question (and no conferring): do you intend to honour your 2001
election pledge relating to the Island Strategic Plan - or is your
position as a Minister too important to you?

2005 Illiam Dhone
English Oration by Roly Drower

In 2005, Jersey will begin the
process of introducing a ministerial system of government to its
people. Their current system will be replaced by a chief minister and
up to ten ministers. In this respect they will be following the Isle of
Man, which has had ministerial government since 1986.

Don't do it Jersey! At least - don't follow our model. The Manx
ministerial system has been, in my view, very damaging to democracy.

Why? Because the Council of Ministers has become more powerful than the
parliament that should control it.

Firstly, there is the problem of the ministerial block vote. Ten
ministers are simply too much for a small elected assembly. We have
nine, plus the Chief Minister, which, until Mr Corkill resigned,
amounted to 40% of any vote in the House of Keys.

We also have a large number of members of departments, who can be seen
as deputy ministers. Precisely why we need so many members of Tynwald
tied up doing work that ministers and their civil servants should be
doing defeats me.

But all of them, as members of the Government, are expected to respect
the ministerial consensus, and to observe collective responsibility.
The footprint in an electoral assembly of this mass of nodding dogs
almost guarantees that the "ayes" have it in any vote.

Next, there is the manner in which ministers are appointed. The Chief
Minister is not elected with a national manifesto by the people, but by
the very parliament in which the consensus mentality lives and
breathes. When the Chief is elected, it is he or she that selects the
Council of Ministers, who then go on to choose their members. This is a
recipe for cronyism.

Then there is the manner in which members of the Government are
rewarded. Parliamentarians receive more on their salary if they are
members of departments, and a substantial amount more if they are
ministers. Although collective responsibility is not itself enforced,
the financial rewards for keeping to the ministerial line are very
large - as are the penalties for speaking out of turn. As was
demonstrated in the last Gelling Government, breaking ranks can get you
sacked.

Take these three problems alone and you have an amorphous organism at
the heart of government that has practically ensured that it does not
have an opposition. Is that the sort of government the people of Jersey
are looking for?

In the November issue of a Jersey newsletter entitled "We want our
Island Back", I found the following:

"The Island [Jersey] is ready for party politics. Let's go ahead now!
Having one party is downright dangerous, don't you think? .
. . We believe Jersey needs the safeguard of a political system that
encourages real democracy. Having a party in power and an opposition
party is the tried and tested method favoured by many democracies
around the world."

We do not have an opposition on the Isle of Man because any attempt at
forming a coherent party system usually fizzles out. This is because,
if any members of a potential opposition are elected, they are soon
sweetened with government jobs. What little outspoken, and
out-of-pocket, opposition then remains, is shouted down as
narrow-minded, counter-productive, or even subversive.

These are not my only complaints about ministerial government.

How, for example, do we find out what decisions are actually being made
by our Council of Ministers? It holds its meetings in closed session
without publishing an agenda, even to MHKs, and without making a copy
of their minutes available to the public.

Given that all the real decision making is done in the Council of
Ministers, not in the parliament, and given that many subjects worthy
of a full debate in the House are hurriedly chaperoned through the Keys
with the block vote, the hansard has effectively been taken out of the
public domain and made inaccessible to the electorate.

All this from a government that claims to be committed to transparency.

Secrecy has isolated government so far from the people that very few of
us actually know what the policies of our government actually are. They
publish a Government Plan. But this is not a manifesto so much as a
list of lame mantras about the aims and purpose of government.

For instance:

"To pursue manageable and sustainable growth based on a diversified
economy."

Or

"To progress the social well-being of the people of the Island."

It is difficult to extract information from a set of policies that have
been distilled from rain-water. They tell you nothing about what is
going to happen next.

But, fluffed up with this vapour of good intention, the Government
becomes assured, arrogant and so disconnected from its electorate that
ministers appear to run amok, spending millions of pounds of taxpayers
money on glamorous projects for which they have no mandate whatsoever
from the electorate. Half of the glamorous projects turn out to be
white elephants, and all of them turn out to have cost twice if not
three times the norm.

In a recent issue of the South Douglas Community Newsletter, David
Cretney said of recent events:

"Arrogance, egos and lack of transparency have no place in a modern
democracy."

So it is official, is it David? We can tell Jersey to add arrogance to
the list of problems that ministerial government will bring with it?

The Tourism Minister is referring, perhaps, to a Chief Minister who, in
the midst of a blast of serious allegations, arrogantly refused to step
down again and again until, finally, his arrest was so internationally
conspicuous that it brings with it the Irish and UK press.

Or perhaps he is referring to a Treasury Minister who, having been
found to have knowingly misled his own parliament and his own people by
both a Commission of Inquiry and a Standards Committee, refuses point
blank to resign. Well, the Manx people are all sick of your protests,
Mr Bell. Just go!

Let me remind you of one of those core aims of government again.

"To pursue manageable and sustainable growth based on a diversified
economy."

Our politicians - shopkeepers for the most part - have been using the
word 'growth' for years without once demonstrating that they know what
the word means. Now they have magically added the word 'sustainable' to
it.

Sustainable growth? In what? In the wealth of the existing population?
In the population itself?

Well, sorry to break up the meeting guys, but 'growth'is not
'sustainable'.

I spent hours at university sweating over the equations of growth. They
occur in problems ranging from the exponential increase of populations
to the runaway fission in a nuclear bomb. They do not, in my mind,
characterise stability. They do, however, characterise our management
of resources on the planet as a whole - a massive burn out, then
nothing left.

The only growth that is sustainable is zero growth. Period.

I mention growth because it leads us quite nicely to another ailment in
our system of government. Spin.

Let's take the Isle of Man Strategic Plan. When this document was
presented to the public for comment in 2001, I wrote to DoLGE
protesting about the way it gaily used the word 'development'.

Why are words important? Because 'development' is like the word
'growth'. Our politicians have allowed it to become central to the very
language of planning. The word means (according to my dictionary) the
process of making something fuller, or larger. It is about increase. It
is not about constancy, or stasis, or even remotely restraint.

When you read the Strategic Plan on one hand, and see the vast spending
on infrastructure on the other; when you see ministers overturning the
decisions of planning committees and independent inspectors to give
planning permission to companies that blatantly profiteer; then it is
very hard to believe that there is not some hidden intention within
government to smooth the way for a substantial increase in population.

The mindset of those behind planning in this regard was revealed with
brutal clarity in 2002 when the former Director of Planning, Barry
Vannan defended his support for residential development at Mount Murray
on the radio. He explained, and I quote:

"..Malta, that's half the size of the Isle of Man and has a population
somewhere about 400,000 .. the Channel Islands, there's a population of
something like 150,000, 160,000 people in something like a quarter of
the land mass .."

By extension then, according to a once respected senior planning
official, the Isle of Man can comfortably accommodate over half a
million people. Well, yes! - if you want it to end up looking like part
of Middlesex.

Anyway. I was not even graced with an acknowledgement for my letter in
2001. And, sure enough, in the 2004 version of the Strategic Plan the
word 'development' is everywhere. It falls off the pages.

According to DoLGE it is required by statute to maintain a 'Development
Plan', and the Strategic Plan forms part of this Development Plan. A
strange hierarchy because this means that planning strategy - if we can
call something that only plans for the next 12 years a 'strategy' at
all - is subservient to the principal motive of 'development', rather
than the reverse. Would a 'Conservation Plan' not have been more
appropriate.

Two differences between the 2001 version and the 2004 versions of the
Strategic Plan give the game away.

In the new version, the word 'sustainable' has been sprinkled in like
fairy-dust to give us the nice buzz phrase 'Sustainable
development'. They even use it in the title, 'Towards a Sustainable
Island'.

I would argue again that 'development' is no more sustainable than
'growth'.

But listen to this: In the 2001 Strategic Plan the number of new
dwellings proposed was 3500 in ten years, or 350 per year. In the new
Draft Strategic Plan, it is 5400 in 12 years, or 450 per year.

I'll run it past you again, in case you missed it. One: They add the
word 'sustainable?. Two: They increase the rate increase by almost 30%.

Now that is what I call spin.

It is a source of endless despair to me that politicians charged with
planning for the future seem to be unable to see beyond their own brief
lifetimes. They handle the future the same way a dysfunctional parent
handles a credit card. They live for the moment, cashing in the
pension, heaping hire-purchase agreements on their grand-children,
content to extend the patio onto the vegetable garden, and then
describe that as 'sustainable growth'.

So that is my take on Ministerial Government: Spin, arrogance, secrecy,
a system of block vote, cronyism and consensus by reward. The very
opposite of democracy. What message will this give our friends in
Jersey?

But I will end on this one positive thought. If democracy is easy to
break, it is probably quite easy to fix as well.